Hey there, time traveller!This article was published 7/10/2013 (1158 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Everyone involved -- players, coaches and management -- dives into something like this understanding there will never be perfection. That's as much a given in the National Hockey League as toothless grins and playoff beards.

The league's deadliest power plays, on average, score on just one of every four chances, no matter how much talent is put on the ice during any particular advantage. And yet the mismatch -- be it a one- or two-player advantage -- still offers the best opportunity to turn a loss into a win and an extended summer vacation into a post-season appearance.

TREVOR HAGAN / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS ARCHIVES

Captain Andrew Ladd battles for the puck. Attacking the competition is key to the power play. Purchase Photo Print

THE CANADIAN PRESS ARCHIVES

Bryan Little says the key to an effective power play is to keep it simple.

And as evidence of that last fact, we give you the Winnipeg Jets -- who held the embarrassing distinction of owning the worst power play in the NHL last season while missing a playoff berth by just four points.

That, in part, explains why head coach Claude Noel assigned Pascal Vincent a little extra homework this past summer: to spend time studying the Jets' own work on the power play versus the teams that have made it an effective difference-maker.

And while it's much too early to draw any concrete conclusions, it's worth noting through three games this year, the Jets have power-play goals in all three games and have hit on three of their 13 chances (23.1 per cent).

Last season the success rate was a measly 13. 8 per cent.

So, what exactly, has changed in this albeit small sample size?

"We're trying to keep it simple," said Bryan Little. "We're not the kind of team that is going to try and make seam passes and try to pass it through guys. We try to make a couple quick passes and then shoot the puck. We don't care if it's going to be pretty or not, we just need to shoot the puck and get traffic there. That's our main focus."

"We're moving the puck a little quicker and I like our breakout," added Evander Kane. "It's quick movement and getting shots to the net and waiting to make the right plays, maybe not rushing it and just firing it from the blue-line. We're taking our time a little bit more and looking for that right shot.

"(Vincent) works really hard and he's really dedicated to the power play. As players on the power play, it makes you want to do well for him because he's such a good guy. He studies and studies and studies and he always has something for us in terms of what we need to do in terms of who we're playing."

That was part of what Vincent & Co. decided to do after their summer thesis work on the power play that included studying what the top three teams -- Washington, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia -- did with their man advantages.

"How you attack the team and the way you are going to enter the puck is a mentality that those teams at the top have that is a little bit different than just going on the power play and setting it up," Vincent explained.

"We wanted to give the players assignments on the ice. This is what you have to do, you're responsible for it. It's pretty simple, actually, but it's after studying what the other teams were doing.

"You have to adjust your plan to the players you have. What they have in Pittsburgh, Washington or Philly is not what we have here... and vice versa. So we took some of what they were doing and some of what we were doing last year and made a mix. There's still things we're doing and adjusting. It's a daily thing."

The Jets have established some firm power-play goals for this season based on the number of shots and scoring chances they generate on each chance, and their time of possession.

But again, this is a work that will forever be in progress. Even the top power plays in the league will always be tinkering with ways to up their success rate.

As for the Jets, one of the main goals was to adopt a shooter's mentality, but also not become robotic in just feeding the point for blasts from the blue-line.

"There's different areas on the ice that you want to attack, they're not passing areas, they're shooting areas," said Vincent. "We used to call it the slot, but it's a little bit bigger than that. It's about how we enter the puck and our decision-making, our rush attack.

"These are things we're always going to be working on all the time. It's always evolving."

ed.tait@freepress.mb.ca Twitter: @WFPEdTait

THE POWER-PLAY PROJECT

Jets coach Claude Noel asked assistant Pascal Vincent to dive into the power play over the summer and come up with some possible solutions for the club's anemic man-advantage numbers. His solutions are hardly revolutionary, but the club does have a PP goal in each of the first three games. Here are Vincent's three keys to a successful power play:

1. DEVELOP A SHOOTING MENTALITY

Vincent: "Shooting mentality means shooting the puck when there is a lane to the net, not shooting it just for the sake of shooting the puck. If we don't have time to have somebody in front, then it's a wasted shot."

2. IMPROVE PUCK POSSESSION/RETRIEVALS

Vincent: "It's critical a team is good at retrievals because if when you shoot the puck you don't get it back, it's another 20 to 25 seconds before you can even hope to get a second chance."

3. AN INTENSE BATTLE LEVEL

Vincent: "Most of the teams have good skaters and hard-working guys on the ice during the penalty kill and Ds that can block shots. You have to be able to beat that, and to beat those four guys, you have to work harder. I'm not talking about skills, about size... if you don't have a shooting mentality, if you don't have the retrievals and you don't win the battles, you're not going to have any success on the power play.

PP NUMBERS

The NHL's top three power plays last season belonged to Washington (26.8 per cent), Pittsburgh (24.7) and Philadelphia (21.6). Winnipeg was 30th at 13.8.

The Jets failed to score a power-play goal in 30 of their 48 games last season.

Winnipeg had three particularly ugly stretches on the PP, going eight games from Feb. 7-23 without a goal as well as seven games between Feb. 26-March 10 and March 28-April 9 with zilch-o on the man advantage.

The Jets were one of four teams who did not score a five-on-three power-play goal last season. The others -- St. Louis, Ottawa and Boston -- were all playoff teams. Winnipeg's nine minutes of five-on-three power-play time last year tied for the 9th-most. Boston, by comparison, had just 1:40.

Of the top five power-play goal scorers in Thrashers/Jets history only one player -- Bryan Little -- is still with the team. 1. Ilya Kovalchuk (115), Vyacheslav Kozlov (51), Marian Hossa (39) and Dany Heatley (31) all rank ahead of Little, who has 27.

Alex Ovechkin's 16 PP goals last year were just four less than the Jets had as a team (20).

The Jets'/Thrashers' best ever PP numbers came during the 2005-06 season when they finished seventh overall with the man advantage. In 13 years, the franchise's PP has averaged 20th place overall.

-- Ed Tait

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